Syrian Studies Association Bulletin - Vol. 27, 1, Fall 2023

Syrian Studies Association Bulletin The Bulletin is the regular publication of the Syrian Studies Association, an international association create to promote research on and scholarly understanding of Syria. Joel Veldkamp, Editor Geoffrey Schad, Book Review Editor Volume 27, Number 1 (Fall 2023) Table of Contents Letter from the Editor (p. 3) Joel Veldkamp Letter from the President (p. 5) Edith Szanto SSA Book and Article Prize Announcements (p. 7) Prize committee: Dawn Chatty, Michael Provence, James Reilly 1 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Feature Articles Mapping history, while erasing it: The case of the 2002 edition of An Historical Atlas of Islam (p. 9) Johannes S. T. Waardenburg An “Archive of Counter-Insurgency”: Subalternity and the Syrian Uprising (p. 20) Jack McGinn The Strangeness of Language as a Wound out of Displacement: On Translating Salim Barakat’s Childhood Autobiography (p. 27) Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy Research Notes (p. 39) Studying the Syria Crisis of 1957 Gabriel Odom Book Reviews (p. 43) Max Weiss. Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba‘thist Syria (2022). Reviewed by Lovisa Berg Matthieu Rey. When Parliaments Ruled the Middle East: Iraq and Syria, 1946–63 (2022). Reviewed by David Motzafi-Haller 2 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Letter from the Editor Joel Veldkamp [email protected] Welcome to the Fall 2023 issue of the Syrian Studies Association Bulletin! It was a great pleasure to edit this issue of the Bulletin. I know you will find, as I did, that the pieces contained herein are thought-provoking, wide-ranging, and not dull for a moment. To start, Johannes Waardenburg brings us a fascinating scholarly mystery. While he was in the process of selecting maps for his book La Siria Contemporanea: ridisegnando la Carta del Vicino Oriente, he was startled to discover that the maps in the updated version of An Historical Atlas of Islam had been altered, to the effect that they no longer displayed the primary trade routes connecting Greater Syria. Waardenburg explores the disturbing implications of this erasure for our understanding of this region. What results is a profound meditation on the many ways that historic Bilad al-Sham has been erased and dismembered over the past century, and how easily scholarship can reinforce this dismemberment. Next, Jack McGinn presents a tale of two revolutions. One was the 2011 uprising in Syria that most Western observers saw – a peaceful movement based on citizenship claims, led by courageous, tech savvy youth activists, which was eventually overtaken by the violence of the regime and jihadist groups. The other Syrian revolution – one based in the countryside, and driven by ties of community and place – was less visible to Westerners, but ultimately of greater import. Surprisingly enough, as McGinn shows, one of the clearest entry points to this topic is a question that should be easy to answer: what day did the Syrian Revolution actually start? Using both literary theory and concepts from psychoanalysis, Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy offers a penetrating look at the autobiography of one of Syria’s greatest living poets, Salim Barakat. As a Syrian Kurd who dazzled contemporaries like Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis with his mastery of Arabic verse, Barakat’s life and work embody a painful paradox: he writes in Arabic to communicate the experience of having his own mother tongue, Kurdish, violently suppressed. Roshdy, who is working on a translation of Barakat’s autobiography into English, takes us deep into the vocabulary and rhythms of this work, extracting insights about the nature of translation, violence, and language itself. 3 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) The Syrian Civil War has, of course, severely limited the ability of academics to access sources inside Syria. However, there are still many places to study Syria from the outside. In our research notes section, Gabriel Odom takes us on a tour of archives in the United States that are relevant for studying Syria’s Cold War history, particularly the 1957 crisis, when U.S.-Soviet brinksmanship over Syria nearly led to war in the region and beyond. Some of these archival sites may surprise you. Last year, the Syrian Studies Association awarded its annual book prize to Max Weiss for his Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba‘thist Syria. In this issue’s book review section, we feature a review of this important work from Lovisa Berg, who takes us on a tour of Weiss’ treatment of “aesthetics of power and aesthetics of solidarity and resistance” in contemporary Syria. And David MotzafiHaller reviews Matthieu Rey’s 2022 book When Parliaments Ruled the Middle East: Iraq and Syria, 1946-63. As Motzafi-Haller shows, Rey’s work gives much-needed attention to Iraq and Syria’s neglected parliamentary era – the “long 1950s” – and extricates this era from Cold War narratives, restoring agency to the Syrian and Iraqi leaders who worked to craft modern states in this period. Today, more than ever, working in the field of Syrian studies requires optimism. Our scholarship is an affirmation of our belief that, in spite of thirteen years of war and atrocities and decades of authoritarianism, Syria still has the power to inspire us, and still has much to teach us. Each of the pieces in this issue of the Bulletin, in its own way, re-affirms this belief. It is a privilege to present them here. Joel Veldkamp received his PhD in history from the Geneva Graduate Institute in 2021. His dissertation was entitled, “The Politics of Aleppo’s Christians and the Formation of the Syrian Nation-State, 1920-1936.” He currently works for Christian Solidarity International in Zurich, Switzerland. 4 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Letter from the President Edith Szanto (University of Alabama) [email protected] Dear Readers, It is with great pleasure that I may announce volume 27. I am immensely grateful to Joel Veldkamp for soliciting and editing the contributions to this issue. This year, we are welcoming the following new members to the SSA board: • • • • Reem Bailony will be serving as the new President. Beverly Tsacoyanis will be serving as the new President-Elect. Basileus Zeno will be serving as the new Junior Member at Large. Yasmeen Mobayed will be serving as the new Graduate Student Representative. We are grateful to the following members of the board, who continue to serve terms: • • • Faedah Totah continues to serve the SSA as the Treasurer. Joel Veldkamp continues to serve as the SSA Bulletin Editor. Andrea Stanton continues to serve as the SSA Webmaster. • • Michael Provence continues to serve as the Chair of the Prize Committee. Rana Mikati continues to serve as the Senior Member at Large. We thank Mohammed Kadalah who served the SSA as the Graduate Student Representative, as well as Reem Bailony for having served the SSA as the Junior Member at Large. As for me, it has been my pleasure serving the SSA during the past two years as the president. I will now be serving as Past President. At this year’s MESA annual meeting in Montreal, the SSA is holding the annual business meeting on Saturday, November 4 from 3 to 5 pm. We will concurrently be honoring Dawn Chatty for her work on Syria and her service to the SSA. The SSA is sponsoring two panels at MESA. The first is entitled “Writing Syrian History in Times of Disaster” and the second is entitled “The Syrian Refugee Crisis: Historical Antecedents, Literary Production, and Religious Humanitarianism.” We look forward to seeing you there! 5 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Best wishes, Edith Szanto President of the Syrian Studies Association Edith Szanto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. She was formerly an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. 6 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Syrian Studies Association: 2023 Prizes Prize Committee: Dawn Chatty (Oxford), James Reilly (Toronto), Michael Provence (UCSD) Best Dissertation: Murat Bozluolcay, Coalescence of the Empire: Administration of the Provincial Economy in Ottoman Damascus, 1820–1860 (Princeton University, Department of Near Eastern Studies) Dr. Bozluolcay's study of the transformation of Ottoman sovereignty during the nineteenth century is superbly researched and powerfully written, focusing exhaustively on the provincial economy of Damascus between 1820-1860. It is a masterful historical study of an era when regional Ottoman autonomy and the extraterritoriality of European interests coalesced. By focusing on provincial financing, taxation, and the opening up of “Syria” to European interests, the author superbly outlines the changing relationship between the Ottoman Sublime Porte and its provincial government and administration. The economy of Damascus until the late 1820s revolved administratively around the political and financial management of the yearly pilgrimage from the city to Mecca and Medina. By the 1860s, Damascus had a provincial council with a central role in tax farming and sizeable revenue. This was the gateway to the institutionalizing the share of imperial sovereignty with Damascene elite. Best Article: China Sajadian, “The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism Across the Lebanese-Syrian Border.” (Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, Volume 10, Number 1, 2023) Dr. Sajadian has written an outstanding anthropological study of al-maghmurin (the drowned) from the villages flooded after the Euphrates Dam in Tabqa was built. The article documents how the displaced managed their limited compensation with seasonal farm work in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, but since 2011, have become refugee farm workers. It is a study of dislocation, dispossession, and displacement into Lebanon, first as seasonal farm workers in the Bekaa, and post-2011 as refugees. The state dam project displaced them, the loss of sufficient land afterwards dispossessed them, and the war in Syria made them refugees. 7 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) The author provides an elegant analysis of the way in which vernacular narratives about the Euphrates Dam resurrected Ba‘thist ideals of state-led agrarian development and stability. The intergenerational history of economic insecurity which ensued, the decades of seasonal rural out-migration, and their current insecurity, tension, and everyday predicament as refugee farmworkers, is brilliantly analyzed. 8 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Mapping history, while erasing it: The case of the 2002 edition of An Historical Atlas of Islam Johannes S. T. Waardenburg (University of Milan - IULM) [email protected] Abstract: It has become increasingly difficult to represent the general regional setup on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean before the creation of the nation-states to students and a larger public. Conflict, forced deportation, dispossession, creation of boundaries and alienation have all deeply eroded the Bilad al-Sham on the ground, socially, economically, demographically and in terms of cultural heritage. The present paper examines certain attempts at representation in widely circulated printed material and resources available online, asking whether historical cartography is immune to the contemporary trend of cancellation. During the preparation for the final layout of the 2021 publication in Italian of the present author’s La Siria contemporanea: ridisegnando la carta del Vicino Oriente,1 it was decided with the publisher to integrate visual elements which would show the geographic integrity of the Bilad al-Sham region. One aim of the book is in fact to demonstrate that the al-Asad family in power in Damascus has had quite a different understanding of the eventual limits to its influence than the borders of Syria would suggest. 2 Nowadays, the Levant region, as it is also called, is commonly divided among at least five states. It would be reasonable to include Cyprus and parts of Turkey too. Specialists of this part of the Arab world know quite well that the imposition of such an array of borders occurred quite recently, during the 20th century, as a consequence of both the Ottoman defeat during WWI and the meeting of the representatives of six governments in San Remo, Italy, on April 25, 1920. The countries which decided the destiny of the Mashriq on that occasion were Belgium, France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy and Japan. Often, the general public lacks the understanding that this event played an essential role in producing the region’s volatility. The region was disrupted, its destiny taken hostage and economic and social life channelled and put 1 In translation: Contemporary Syria and the shifting of the borders in the Middle East. The present article is to be considered part of the proceedings of the UEAI Congress (7-9 July 2022) held in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It corresponds to the presentation held on that occasion by the author. 2 9 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) under foreign control. It provoked some of the major tensions which have plagued the Arab world ever since. The meeting at San Remo, which took place in a country which was itself in profound social, economic and political upheaval, came against the backdrop of the unsuccessful British-led foreign intervention (1918-19) against the new Bolshevik order in Russia. France had helped to craft the postwar order at the Paris Peace conference in January 1919January 1920. At the San Remo Conference, France finally had its claims over parts of the Levant and Anatolia accepted by Great Britain. This had been anticipated by the withdrawal of British troops from Damascus on November 25, 1919, and followed the military occupation of Constantinople by Britain on March 16, 1920. In the meantime, since the end of 1918, the French had been facing an Alawite-led military resistance to their occupation of what is now the Syrian coast. The San Remo agreement can therefore rightfully be seen as the response to a perceived urgency by London to bring colonial law and order to the Mashriq, accommodating France to a certain extent along the way. Still, the solution adopted, granting two European countries mandates for the region rather than following up on the principles of self-determination, as supported by the King-Crane commission, for example, would unleash constant regional instability in the decades to come. This was already clear with the protests that broke out in Iraq in May 1920. Three other instruments would be used by the colonial powers to maintain a reasonable degree of control over the future of the region and exploit its people and resources: the promotion of a corrupt ruling class, interference in the internal affairs of the region’s states whenever a degree of independence was likely to be reached and, most significantly, the establishment of a general antidemocratic architecture which would prevent the election of any regional assembly such as for example the General Syrian Congress of 1919-20. The British were especially worried about such an eventuality, prompting them to promote the creation of the Arab League of States on March 22, 1945. To a large extent, one can consider the borders that now tear through the Bilad alSham as chains alienating the people and their historical social fabric. The indicators of a common heritage are still everywhere, in fact: in language (spoken and written), social practices, family connections, traditional building materials, cultural life, and, of course, food, to name only a few examples. However, this regional interconnection is often not clear even to the new generation of researchers when they visit or follow what happens in a certain country. This represents a further consequence of the decisions made by the European allies in the first half of 20th century. Joining the pieces of the geographic puzzle back together remains essential to see the particularities of the region and to put 10 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) various problems into perspective. Furthermore, it is especially relevant if one wants to grasp the specific understanding upon which the expansionist policy of the al-Asads was based. With this aim in view, in preparation for the Italian publication already mentioned, two sorts of geographic indications were considered as primary. They would have to be very clear on the maps in the book: first, the road and rail connections existing up until the mandate period along the whole coastal region of the Bilad al-Sham, and second, the commercial and travel links between the desert region and the coast. To show the road and rail connections, Syrie – Palestine (Iraq – Transjordanie), by Marcel Monmarché (ed.), published by Hachette in Paris in 1932 in the series of the Guides Blues was selected. It features precise color maps of that period. To show the desert-coast commercial links, a map was chosen from the 1981 edition of Brill’s An Historical Atlas of Islam by (ed.) William C. Brice (for which Donald Edgar Pitcher had done some preparatory work). It shows these routes as they existed at the end of the Mamluk period. These routes were not new, of course, nor were they dramatically terminated under the Ottomans; the map from the Mamluk period was simply chosen because the maps in the atlas showing older or more 3 recent periods focus on other “features, economic, strategic or ethnic.” 3 A revised edition of An Historical Atlas of Islam came out in 2002, months after the American invasion of Afghanistan and the promulgation of the War on Terror as a “crusade,” drawing on the idea of a “Clash of Civilisations.” It happened that this edition was the one the publisher had in his office. His copy was therefore brought to the typographer for the relevant map to be scanned, after having first obtained the necessary authorisation from Brill. However, when the typographer produced the relevant document, the present author’s immediate reaction was astonishment. On the following three pages, the reader can see the map from the 1981 edition of An Historical Atlas of Islam, the same map from the 2002 edition, and finally, details of the Bilad al-Sham from the two maps side by side. Maps taken from An Historical Atlas of Islam, ed. William C. Brice, (Brill, 1981), and An Historical Atlas of Islam, ed. Hugh Kennedy, (Brill, 2002). Used with permission. An Historical Atlas of Islam, 1981, p.vi. 11 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) An Historical Atlas of Islam: 1981 12 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) An Historical Atlas of Islam: 2002 13 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) An Historical Atlas of Islam: 1981 An Historical Atlas of Islam: 2002 14 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) The map scanned from the 2002 edition was of no use, precisely because the one piece of information that was necessary to show the Italian reader had vanished altogether. This map, which had been chosen to illustrate the centuries-old socioeconomic connection between desert and sea, had been transformed. It didn’t show the link anymore. The routes had been erased from the map, anticipating what would happen on the ground four and a half centuries later. The only road in the Bilad al-Sham still shown was a via maris connecting Aleppo, Homs, Tarabulus and the Palestinian coast with Egypt. This gives the impression that the interior was a huge desert, waiting for the decisive moment it would finally be irrigated. There were other problems too: apart from transliteration questions, the map no longer showed any direct passage between the Hijaz region (including the port city of Jiddah) and today’s Iraq. This also could seem very odd. Therefore there seemed to be a serious scholarly issue at stake. The present author’s first reaction was to wonder if there was any viable reason for these changes. Trusting the excellent academic standards always cherished by both the distinguished editor of the 2002 version, Professor Hugh Kennedy, and the renowned publisher E. J. Brill, it was believed that the explanation for these changes would be found in the 4 5 introduction to the new edition. Such information would be crucial, as the new generation of scholars would not necessarily have both editions at their disposal. In the preface to the 2002 edition, Professor Kennedy explains that the map here considered (found on page twelve) is among a group which has been modified: When approaching the Atlas, the maps seemed to fall into three categories. … The second group were maps which, while basically adequate, needed more or less extensive editing to make them consistent and accurate. These include the maps of the Muslim world (4-14)… 4 At this stage one might be inclined to think that the changes – “my task,” as the editor sees them – which turned out so surprising, are justified: “Roads, or more accurately, main routes, I have attempted to show, although inevitably in an era of trackways and wandering paths, these can only give a general idea.” 5 As we have seen, central routes were indicated in the 1981 edition but taken out for the edition of 2002. To be precise, judging by what Professor Kennedy has written, he might have redrawn all the maps from scratch and then put in what he saw as main routes (“extensive editing”). However, the 1981 and 2002 versions of An Historical Atlas of Islam, 2002, viii. An Historical Atlas of Islam, 2002, ix. 15 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) the map look very much alike (apart from the colors used), even in their details. One has the impression that the routes in question have simply been erased, cancelled by the cartographers in the process of refurnishing (“less extensive editing”). They have not been deleted to make way for new, essential information – they are simply gone. Thus, the methodological information given in the preface to the 2002 edition confirms that interventions have occurred on the part of the editing staff, and makes clear the criteria used for the new drawings. Still, what is not explained is why these specific connections at the beginning of the 16th century, linking coast and desert, with Damascus at the center of the main trading routes, together with the internal economic artery (notably an important pilgrimage road) between Aleppo and the Hijaz, were reclassified as “trackways and wandering paths.” The only essential roads shown on the new map to exist in the Levant are those connected directly to Cairo. This omission is even stranger when one considers the Mamluks’ maritime adventures and mounting competition with the Portuguese in the Indian ocean, in which the various harbours of the Mamluk sultanate and their hinterland played a pivotal role. The introductions to both the 1981 and 2002 editions of the Atlas state, in identical language: Islam arose near the centre of the Old World, and this series [of maps] is intended to illustrate its spread and the connections, linguistic, economic and cultural, between the regions where it prevailed and the further parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. … Because of the important part played by Muslim countries in the transport of commodities, inventions and ideas between peoples at the extremities of the old continents, special attention is given throughout this series to routes of travel and what moved along them.6 This is precisely the reality the present author sought to highlight through the reproduction of visual documentation in La Siria contemporanea. The alteration to the map in question goes directly against this principle. One is tempted to conclude that the alteration happened without the knowledge of the editor, Professor Kennedy. This editorial case is very important, as it reflects a tendency since the beginning of the 20th century to erase in different ways the integrity of the region.7 Previous to the 6 Pp. xii-xiii in the 2002 edition, p. vi in the 1981 edition. None of the following four book reviews of the Atlas of Islam which came out in the early 2000s highlighted this issue: Pierre Lory in Studia Islamica, 2002, Paul M. Cobb, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2003, Lawrence I. Conrad in Der Islam, 2004, and the editorial board of the Bulletin Critique des Annales Islamologiques in 2005. 7 16 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) publication of the present article, both Professor Kennedy and the publisher were approached in order to understand what had happened. The only explanation obtained (through a third party) was that the editorial project was rushed through at its final stage by the publisher. This case should be taken as a good example of the risks encountered when the necessary time is not given to go through the final proofs. Unknowingly, one’s academic work might be instrumentalized to possibly serve deeprunning political and cultural aims. What happened in the Bilad al-Sham after the drawing of borders during the period of the mandates makes it even more important to be able to rely on precise historical maps showing previous periods. In particular, one has to think of the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the immense consequences this has had regionally. The creation of a state through conquest led to a profound transformation of a central part of the region – including by the ethnic cleansing of its original population – and brought external intervention to a new paroxysm. It also represented a huge change for the Arab Jewish population of the region. Zionism, as a political theory supported also by some Christian groups, looks beyond the present State of Israel, with its borders and institutional structures. This ideological trend for limitless expansion reverberates namely in the profound social rift that has torn the nation apart since the re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu in November 2022. Part of the country would like to settle down, simply exploiting what was achieved after the expulsions of Palestinians (and Syrians) in 1948 and 1967. Another component of society (no less strong) wants to set even further geographic goals and extend their political and economic privileges indefinitely. The second group believes they are the true defenders of the messianic destiny of their people, whereas the first group is more pragmatic. It bears more of the cost of the economic, military and diplomatic effort to hold on to the system of power established after 1948. Even before 1948 and the creation of militarised borders shadowed by minefields, a significant moment of disruption by the Zionist movement of the geographic connections in the region was the destruction of the rail and road connections to Palestine on the night of June 16, 1946 (“The Night of the Bridges”). Traces of this violent breach going back nearly eight decades can still be seen when one travels through the region. The obliteration continues nowadays. When one searches online to find a “map of trade routes in historical Palestine,” many search results reflect a Biblical understanding of the region or a biased history of its inhabitants.8 Online, the reliability of historical maps of the region 8 The remarkable feature which unites the map on p. 12 of the second edition of An Historical Atlas of Islam and these illustrations found on the internet, is the focus in both cases on the “via maris” coastal highway. For the work published by Brill, this focus is really problematic: not only for the reasons already mentioned, but also 17 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) has thus suffered already greatly. Printed material needs to be even more precise and accurate. As a final note, the best example of ongoing cancellation of the history of the Bilad alSham through new cartography is probably the free map a tourist receives upon arrival in Tel Aviv (as shown on the next page). Undoubtedly, the underlying policy of public denial and removal will provoke considerable resentment in generations to come. One should expect continuous actions of protest and calls for justice on behalf of those who have been deported and dispossessed. Professor Johannes Waardenburg is presently teaching at the University of Milan (IULM) and responsible for the field of general history of the Arab world (from the 6th to the 21st Century). His recent monograph in two volumes about the history of independent Syria, La Siria Contemporanea: ridisegnando la Carta del Vicino Oriente (Rome, Ipocan, 2021) has become the reference text in Italy on the subject. because it legitimizes a biblical vision of the region, which was gaining momentum precisely at the turn of the century. Therefore, it betrays its own aim to accurately describe the civilizations of the past. 18 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Scan of tourist map distributed at Tel Aviv Airport. Courtesy of Johannes Waardenburg. 19 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) An “Archive of Counter-Insurgency”: Subalternity and the Syrian Uprising Jack McGinn (London School of Economics and Political Science) [email protected] Abstract The Syrian Revolution was an unusual uprising, even within the region, given its spread from rural periphery to urban center (the reverse of the norm), its horizontal or “leaderless” characteristics, with few party structures or traditional leadership models, and the way the revolt was coordinated in a local or “nodal” fashion, with many simultaneous episodes of revolt remaining small-scale, distinct, yet connected. Drought, neoliberal reforms and the destruction of a once-thriving agricultural sector provided further dislocations as a spike in unemployment and rural migration to urban shantytowns led to ripe conditions for challenge to the social compromise. Based on semi-structured interviews with revolutionaries in the Syrian diaspora, along with archival research, this paper explores how those who constructed these nodal episodes conceived of their revolutionary activity, and how the dislocated nature of the uprising(s) impacted their conception of revolution itself. Attempting to think within and beyond debates on what constitutes a revolution (Allinson 2019, Bayat 2017), this piece explores how participants' self-perception, decision-making and ideological heterodoxy amidst revolution's warping of time and space (Aziz, 2012), in which lay the possibility of forging a new world, created its own mythos or political imaginary - a fragmented and contradictory collection of ideas subsumed under the collective imaginary of the Syrian Revolution. Following Gramsci, Guha's injunction to examine the “neglected dimension of subaltern autonomy in action, consciousness and culture,” and Hartman's “critical fabulation” to locate traces/absences in the archive, the piece complicates the linear notion of revolutionary moment leading to civil war. This article is based on a chapter in the author’s forthcoming PhD dissertation. Long considered a “Kingdom of Silence,” in the concise formulation of Riad al-Turk and others, Syria and its uprising provide an interesting setting to examine subaltern politics and agency in revolt. Existing networks of exchange and cooperation that operated in marginal, liminal zones – made necessary by the total control the regime exercised in traditional civic space (unions, universities, religious fora, etc.) – served as the basis for contentious action, with smugglers and saboteurs the best equipped and most experienced at undermining the regime’s 20 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) repressive apparatus. The broader ecosystem surrounding these illicit economies – the “marginal” villages and neighborhoods furthest from the loci of power – thus became the incubators of revolt. To learn about the most recent, or “postmodern” genus of revolt (Carrigan, 1995), it behooves us to study this relatively welldocumented experience that exists in living memory, even if it now appears to have been extinguished by repression from the regime and its regional allies, the emergence of new transnational Salafijihadist actors, and the militarization of the uprising itself. The complete closure of Syria’s civic space over the course of Hafiz al-Asad’s 30-year rule led to a fragmented society and few opportunities for the forging of social ties and solidarity, typically built through unions, universities, religious institutions and the media. Each of these were coopted and brought to heel by Asad’s increasingly insular and paranoid autocracy, with ideological obedience further ensured via an extensive network of patronage through a large public sector, subsidies on education and basic foodstuffs, and a massive surveillance state (Wedeen, 1999). His death in 2000 led to the (controversial, even within loyalist circles) inheritance of the presidency by his son, Bashar, whose first decade of rule engendered several important changes. The most important of these was a program of rampant economic liberalization, severing the social contract between peasants, workers and the state (the backbone of his father’s legitimacy) and establishing a new alliance of Alawite officers and Sunni businessmen, with the prototypical figure of this being the formerly all-powerful Rami Makhlouf. Bashar’s reforms, followed by a severe drought in 2006–8, precipitated the uprising in the rural south. The Hauran district and its capital, Dara‘a, had until then been known as “the reservoir of the Ba‘th.” But fractures were visible from as early as the 1970s, when Hafiz’s neopatrimonial state outsourced “much of its development program to foreign firms and contractors, fueling a growing linkage between the state and private capital” (Hinnebusch, Syria: Revolution from Above, p. 86). The Ba‘thist Development Drive and the Seeds of Revolution Joseph Daher points out that “the geography of the centers of revolt – in northwest Idlib and southwest Dara‘a, and other medium-sized towns, as well as more rural areas – shows a pattern: all were historical strongholds of the Ba‘th Party, having benefited from the policies of agricultural reforms in the sixties” (Daher, 2018). The Ba‘thist program may have contained the seeds of its own destruction. Hafez al-Asad’s modernization drive “brought rural populations under his control, as entire villages were flooded 21 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) when dams were built to increase irrigation capabilities, peasants were contracted to farm and given quotas for their yields, and technological innovations replaced traditional agricultural methods” (Manna, 2017). These steps were part of the era’s global “Green Revolution,” whose architects imagined that a profitbased model of agriculture would stem the rise of communism in the Third World. (James C. Scott also relates the fractious encounter between Malay peasants and Green Revolution-style mechanization in his 1985 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, pp. 147–64). The mixed legacy of this modernization drive is embodied in the figure of Syrian cinema’s most prominent documentarian, Omar Amiralay. His early work was produced by Syrian state television and sought to (admiringly) document government development programs. But his 1977 film al-Dajaj highlights the lost promise of state-led agricultural development, where farmers encouraged to raise chickens in a rural area are soon abandoned by the government amidst overproduction and a plague among the animals (Amiralay, 1977). The Role of the “Marginal Population” So who were these dispossessed, who sparked a revolution that was almost impossible to conceive of beforehand? The definition of “marginal population” offered by Carlos Vélez-Ibañez’s important study of central urban Mexico relates to how they are “unwanted and ‘redundant’” (Vélez-Ibañez, 1983, p. 92) in the face of government development strategies – much as Syria’s rural workers faced the removal of agricultural subsidies in 2005, and urban workers suffered the consequences of neoliberal reforms, including sharp increases in poverty, unemployment, and social inequalities. (The recent protests in Suwayda were also initially a response to the removal of fuel subsidies). Though it appears clear that the most marginalized workers had the most to gain from a revolution, and the most fervent contentious activity came from peripheral zones like Dara’a, Kurdish areas in the northeast, and the shanty towns around Damascus, the revolt’s documentary record is dominated by media activists, intellectuals and the urban middle class. This incongruity is reflected in the dubious consensus that has formed around the date of the Syrian Revolution’s beginning. It is typically given as March 15, 2011, the date of a sparsely attended “Day of Rage” protest in Damascus that was promoted by Facebook activists, rather than March 18, 2011, the date when thousands of working-class Sunnis marched from Dara’a's ‘Omari Mosque following the abduction of 15 teenagers who had scrawled anti-regime graffiti. Ahmed Abazeid notes how the March 15 protest fit the narrative of tech-savvy youth imitating the “Twitter revolutions” in Tunisia and Egypt. “March 18, on the other hand,” he writes, refers to a 22 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) narrative of the “tough and compassionate fabric” of “local society” facing oppression by treating the regime as though it were “a foreign element,” and in turn violently repressed. This narrative further relies upon the “battlefield” ethos attached to an “innate moral … solidarity” in rural or tribal settings, which were to lead from mass protests to eventual armed insurrection (Abazeid, 2014). Why does the popular memory of the Syrian revolution tend to reproduce the March 15 narrative? This presumably has something to do with the manner in which Western commentators identify with perspectives they find legible – the “secular, liberal, and (above all) Englishspeaking opposition in particular,” as Aron Lund observes (Lund, 2021). Furthermore, it raises questions as to the choices the Syrian intellectual class and broader commentariat has made regarding representation of the uprising – emphasizing to domestic and international audiences their own role as stewards and driving forces, with a clear intellectual link drawn between the muntadayyat of the earlier Damascus Spring and events of 2011. In his notes on “spontaneity and conscious leadership,” in Notebook 3 (§48), Gramsci comments that history’s “most spontaneous” movements leave behind no documents, as the most marginal and peripheral elements involved in this “do not even suspect that their history might possibly have any importance or that it might be of any value to leave documentary evidence of it” (Gramsci, 2021, p. 32). In many ways, Syria’s modern history is marked by examples of subaltern groups attempting to assert themselves upon domestic politics, only to be thwarted, as with the 1834 “peasant revolt” against Egyptian domination, Saleh al-Ali’s anticolonial Alawite revolt of 1919, the same year’s revolt in the Aleppo countryside led by the Kurdish Ibrahim Hananu, the largely Druze-led 1925 “Great Syrian Revolt” against the French, and even the original bargain whereby the marginalized Alawite minority and peasant class sought representation in government via support of Hafiz al-Assad’s coup of 1970. It should also be noted that uprisings associated with the majority – the Sunni, religious and working-class population – such as the 1982 Hama revolt and the 2011 Syrian uprising, were likewise revolts of the marginalized, as the Baathist state had blocked all avenues for popular representation or the airing of grievances. The Elusive Revolution For Syria then, the majority of political activity that fostered and drove a yearslong insurgency is hidden from view, while a minority – the aforementioned “elite” English-speaking, media-literate activist cohort based in the major cities – has served as representative of the Syrian Revolution. (This is not to disparage the vigor, savvy and courage of the latter in the face of the region’s most brutal repression). While this leads to 23 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) imprecision in analyses of the composition of revolutionary forces, it more importantly has presented political difficulties for the opposition, who have at various stages been represented in international fora by a host foreign-backed diplomatic bodies claiming to speak for the revolution from exile: the Syrian National Council (in Istanbul), the Syrian National Coalition (in Doha, later Istanbul), not to mention the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Council (whose first Chairperson was the Paris-based dissident Haytham Manna). So do we still fail to identify the “political” activity practiced by those living at the margins of visible/legible society – in shanty towns, places of rural/urban exchange, peripheries – who fostered Syria’s 2011 moment? Emily Apter, in Unexceptional Politics, calls this a politics that “eludes conceptual grasp, confronting us with the realization that we really do not know what politics is, where it begins and ends, or how its micro-events should be called” (Apter 2018, p. 1). A further analytic deficiency emerging from our misrecognition relates to the refrain of Western observers since 2011: “Where did the revolution go?” Given that our interlocuters were the media-savvy, urban activists who narrated the uprising upon its outbreak, it is to be expected that the subsequent chapters are both bemusing and disheartening, with the country wrought by civil war, regime revanchism, and an “orgy of ‘militant nihilism,’” in Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s phrase. Timothy Mitchell has noted that the state is an “effect of power,” constantly porous/elusive, and revolutions/civil wars are simply “state-making in flux.” In this manner, he suggests that all states are colonial: an act of imposing power upon those without it. Ranajit Guha, in exhorting us to study peasant resistance previously thought of by Hobsbawm and others as “pre-political,” argued that the records of the colonial state had to be understood as an archive of counterinsurgency. It is here, he contends, that we can find traces of Apter’s elusive political activity. Sites of Activity: Baba Amr, Zabadani, Saraqib Identifying, even in the absence of clear records, examples of the important sites of anti-state activity and the manner of contention ought to provide material to locate the traces of the revolutionary subject. Furthermore we can, in a manner similar to Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, look to how most archives of the revolt and worldwide coverage of it, make reference to political oppression and issues of freedom of speech, as compared to the economic oppression primarily experienced (prior to 2011) by the working and rural classes. Here again is the March 15 v March 18 dichotomy. In these cleavages – and indeed it is in Georges Sorel’s “spirit of cleavage” that Gramsci asserts we can identify the emergence of revolutionary consciousness 24 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) – it may be possible to better sketch the form of this “impossible revolution.” The present author’s forthcoming PhD dissertation, of which this article is a part, will take up this task. The sites of activity to be examined are the Baba Amr quarter in Homs, the town of Zabadani near Damascus, and the town of Saraqib in Idlib, all early centers of the revolt. Among the questions that remain to be tackled in further chapters: - - - - What distinguished the revolutionary subaltern activity of 2011 and afterwards from other forms of “everyday resistance” under authoritarianism preceding the uprising? And what links the two? What social movement learning took place in this revolutionary moment, and what record exists of it, as per Laboratories of Learning (Mario Novelli, et al.)? What comparisons can be drawn to other subaltern movements, such as the Zapatistas? What lessons can be drawn for the new ‘wave’ of decentralized revolutionary activity in Syria, especially that of 2019, or the September 2023 protests in Suwayda? Jack McGinn is a research student in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His PhD research concerns decentralized anti-hierarchical organizing in the Syrian uprising. References: Abazeid, Ahmed (2014), ‘15 'am 18: siraʻ al-mujtamaʻ la al-tarikh [15 or 18? A Societal, Not Historical, Struggle]’, Zaman Al-Wasl, 15 March. Available [in Arabic] at: https://www.zamanalwsl.net/news/article/47607 (accessed 31 October 2023). Amiralay, Omar (1977), Al-Dajaj [The Chickens] (Syrian Arab Republic: Channel 1). 25 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Apter, Emily (2018), Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (London: Verso). Carrigan, Ana (1995), ‘Chiapas: The First Post-Modern Revolution’, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter/Spring), pp. 71-98. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/45288922?seq=12 (accessed 13 September 2023). Daher, Joseph & Joe Hayns (2018), ‘Syria is not Exceptional: Interview with Joseph Daher | Part 1’, RS21, 27 April. Available at https://www.rs21.org.uk/2018/04/27/syria-is-notexceptional-interview-with-joseph-daher-part-1/ (accessed 19 September 2023). Gramsci, Antonio (2021), Subaltern Social Groups: A Critical Edition of Prison Notebook 25, eds & trans Joseph A. Buttigieg & Marcus E. Green (New York: Columbia University Press). Hinnebusch, Raymond (2001), Syria: Revolution from Above (Abingdon: Routledge). Lund, Aron (2021), ‘The Politics of Memory: Ten Years of War in Syria’, The Century Foundation, 15 March. Available at: https://tcf.org/content/commentary/politics-memoryten-years-war-syria/ (accessed 31 October 2023). Manna, Jumana (2017), ‘A Small / Big Thing’, tamawuj.org, Sharjah Biennial 13. Available at https://files.cargocollective.com/528515/Jumana-Manna_A-Small-Big-Thing_Tamawuj.pdf (accessed 21 September 2023). Novelli, Mario & Birgul Kutan, Patrick Kane, Adnan Celik, Tejendra Pherali and Saranel Benjamin (2024), Laboratories of Learning: Social Movements, Learning and KnowledgeMaking in the Global South (London: Pluto). Scott, James C. (1985), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Vélez-Ibañez, Carlos G. (1983), Rituals of Marginality: Politics, Process, and Cultural Change in Central Urban Mexico, 1969–1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press). Wedeen, Lisa (1999), Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 26 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) The Strangeness of Language as a Wound out of Displacement: On Translating Salim Barakat’s Childhood Autobiography Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy (University of Southern California) [email protected] Abstract The Syrian Kurdish novelist and poet Salim Barakat (1951) is one of the most distinctive writers in contemporary Arabic literature. Since his first poetry book in 1972, he has shocked the Arabic literary scene with his distinctly Kurdish themes and difficult language. After ten years of exclusively writing poetry, Barakat published his childhood autobiography Iron Grasshopper (1980). Through its poetic narrative, we trace the story of a Kurdish child who found himself rejected by his surrounding Arab community. This will not just affect Barakat’s way of seeing the place, but it will affect his perspective against the Arabic language itself; the official language of his country, but also the intimate linguistic space where he found his voice as a writer. Through translating the first chapter of Barakat’s childhood autobiography, this paper offers a close reading of Barakat’s narrative, showing how it reveals the earliest moments of his childhood ego wound. This wound caused what Abraham and Torok in their Mourning or Melancholia called the “ego gap,” which incorporation tries to fill with fantasies after the failure of introjection to broaden that ego. This paper argues that locating the wound in Barakat’s work is possible only through translation as a form of psychoanalytic close reading. It suggests that this psychological incident will give the birth of Barakat’s violent melancholic Arabic voice - a voice which resists translation, not just for its rare high Arabic lexicon and complicated sentence structure, but also for its Kurdish wildness, which proliferates immensely by exploring more of this Arabic voice, and by going deeper in this wound. 27 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Introduction Barakat was born in Al-Qamishli in northern Syria in 1951. In his young adulthood, in the late sixties and early seventies, Arab nationalist movements were at their peak in the Arab world. There was no place for such a young Kurdish writer in Arabic who wanted to write about the mountain around his childhood’s town, the mountain that was the only true friend for Kurds. (As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in his poem about Barakat, “The Kurd has nothing but wind.”) 1 Without any official papers, Barakat moved to Beirut in 1971, when he was just twenty years old. At that time Beirut was the most diverse city in the Arab world, where writers and artists from different ages, ethnicities and backgrounds lived. However, because of the Lebanese civil war, Barakat would later move to Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1982, with a fake Yemeni passport. In 1999, following some financial issues and problems with his residency in Cyprus, he would move to Stockholm in Sweden, where he lives today. This chain of forced movements and displacements can be read in two lines of one of his poems: No god to lighten the maps No shores for us to sleep on 2 Mahmoud Darwish once said, “I have worked hard to resist the influence of Salim Barakat.” 3 Adonis, the legendary Syrian poet, said after reading Salim’s first published poetry book, “This Kurdish boy carries the keys of the Arabic language in his pocket.” They are not the only writers who have been astonished by the Arabic poetic voice of that Kurdish “boy.” 4 The whole literary scene in Damascus and Beirut in the mid-1970s glorified that wild young voice, and the crack its fresh vitality produced in the monotony of the modernist movement of Arabic poetry at that time. Unusually early for a writer, especially in the Arabic literary tradition, Barakat published his childhood autobiography when he was just 29 years old, after ten years of exclusively writing poetry. It was entitled Iron Grasshopper (al-Jundub alHadidi), with a longer sub-title: “The Incomplete Biography of A Child Who Saw Only A Fugitive Land, So He Shouted: These Are My Traps, O Sandgrouse!” Two years later, he published a second autobiography, entitled, Play the trumpet loudly, play it to its limit (Hatih ‘aliyan, hati al-nafir ‘ala akhirihi). The two books are gathered in one volume called The Two Autobiographies (Al-Siratan), which was published for the first time in 1998 and reprinted in 2017. Mahmoud Darwish, La taʻtadhir ʻamma faʻalt, (Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2004), 157. Salim Barakat, “ʻUshba fi hutam al-marakib,” Al-Antologia, 29 March 2020, www.alantologia.com/blogs/27554. 3 “Diwan 2: Alf safha min shiʻr Salim Barakat,” Majallat al-Roman, 22 June 2017 www.rommanmag.com/view/posts/postDetails?id=4344. 4 “Diwan 2,” Majallat al-Roman. 1 2 28 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) This paper builds its close reading on the experience of translating the first chapter of Barakat’s childhood autobiography, a chapter entitled, “Geometric Violence.” It is a challenging text, with a difficult lexicon and a wild poetic narrative voice. The text also unveils a deep wound in that Kurdish child who is still alive in the Arabic voice of this young writer. That Kurdish child vividly expresses the strong shape of the violence through the melancholic tone of the young writer’s voice. Both melancholia and violence seem to be inevitable in front of the strong presence of the memories in the mind of the young Barakat. It is a melancholia that, in Abraham and Torok’ words, is trying, through incorporation, to fill the gap caused by a wound in the ego of the dual of writer/child. In “The Task of the Translator” (1968), Walter Benjamin suggests that translation is a “form,” which leads one to wonder if translation could be a form of psychoanalytic reading of this work. Here, I claim that translation offers a psychoanalytic reading unveiling the hidden fabrics of the text grasping the wildness of the writer’s Kurdish soul in his Arabic voice. This wildness could be a manifestation of, in Benjamin’s terms, untranslatability, a quality that the work ontologically inherits in its multi-layered identity. The experience of translating the very beginning of this work suggests that only translation offers the closest mode of reading this work, following the dynamics of how incorporation tries to fill the wounded ego after the failure of introjection to broaden that ego. Thus, facing the untranslatability of that wild Kurdish soul in that “strange” Arabic literary voice is precisely the path to unveil its wound; the attempt to translate could be seen as the only form of a true reading of that text. Childhood as an Ordeal From the first paragraph in the chapter, Barakat speaks directly to his reader as “my friend,” as if he needed a kind of closeness or intimacy to reveal his wound to that reader, and as if without that intimacy, he wouldn’t be able to tell his story, the story of a beginning where violence and childhood came together without separation, two faces of one blade causing the very early wound in that child: ‫ ﻣﺜﻞ ﻓﺮاخ‬،‫ ﺻﻐﺎرا ﺟﺪا‬،‫ﺻﺎﺣي‬ ‫ﻛﻨﺎ ﺻﻐﺎرا �ﺎ‬ ‫بي‬ ‫ف‬ ‫واﻗﻔنف‬ ‫ﻃﺮ� اﻟﺸﺎرع ﻛﺴﻄﻮر‬ �‫ﻋ‬ ،‫اﻹوز‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ي‬ .‫ ﻫ�ج ﻣﻬﻮل‬،�‫ﻛﺒ‬ . ‫ﻫ�ج‬ ‫ﺛﻤﺔ‬ ‫وكﺎن‬ ‫اﻟ�ﺘﺎبﺔ‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ اﻟﺬﻳﻦ �ﻘﻔﻮن ي ف‬،‫وكﺎن اﻟﻤﻌﻠﻤﻮن‬ ‫ﺑن اﻟﺼﻔﻮف‬ ‫يف‬ ،‫ أﺷبﻪ بﻘﻄﻂ ﻣﺬﻋﻮرة‬،‫ﻣﻠﻮﺣن بﻌﺼﻴﻬﻢ‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ﺣن �ﻤﺮ‬ ‫ ﻟﻮﺣﻮا بﺄ�ﺪ�كﻢ ي‬،‫ "اﻧتﺒﻬﻮا‬:‫��ﺧﻮن‬ ّ ،‫وﻣﺮ اﻟﺮﺋ�ﺲ‬ ّ ..."‫اﻟﺮﺋ�ﺲ‬ ‫ﻣﺮ وﺳﻄﻨﺎ ﻣﻠﻮﺣﺎ‬ ‫ ﺛﻢ اﺧﺘﻠﻄﺖ اﻟﺼﻔﻮف اﻟﻬﻨﺪﺳ�ﺔ وراء‬،‫ﺑ�ﺪ�ﻪ‬ ّ ‫وﺗﺤﻮﻟﺖ إ� ﻛﺘﻞ ﺳﻮداء‬ ،‫اﻟﻤﻮﻛﺐ‬ ‫ف‬ �‫ ﺳﻘﻂ ﻋ‬.‫ ﻋﻨ�ﻔﺔ ي� ﻓﻮﺿﺎﻫﺎ‬،‫ﻣﺘﺪﺣﺮﺟﺔ‬ ،‫ ﺗﺼﻄﺪم ب يي اﻷﺟﺴﺎد واﻷرﺟﻞ‬،‫اﻷرض ﻣﺮارا‬ ‫ﺣنف‬ ‫وأﻧﺎ أﺟﺎﻫﺪ ﻟﻠﺨﺮوج ﻣﻦ‬ ‫ ي‬،‫اﻟبﺤ�ة اﻵدﻣ�ﺔ‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ت‬ ‫وﺟ� أﻗﺮب إ� اﻟ�اب‬ ‫وﺻﻠﺖ إ� اﻟﺒ�ﺖ كﺎن‬ ‫ي‬ .‫ﻣﻨﻪ إ� وﺟﻪ ﻃﻔﻞ‬ 29 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) We were young, my friend, so young as goslings, standing on the sides of the street like lines of writing. And there was a big commotion, a huge commotion. The teachers who were jumping through the lines, waving their sticks like terrified cats, screamed: “Pay attention, wave your hands when the president passes” … And the president passed, amongst us, waving his hands; then the geometric lines were blurred behind the parade, and converged into rolling black blocks, violent in their chaos. I fell repeatedly, crashed by the bodies and legs, while I was struggling to extract myself from that human lake. And when I came home my face was more like dust than a child. 5 There are key words in this scene: geometric lines, lines of writing, violent in their chaos. Those keys are also connected to the title of the chapter, “Geometric Violence.” The child here is not exposed to violence per se, but to a geometric form of violence. This is how Barakat points to the source of the heaviness caused by this violence. “Geometric” here is also a way of seeing this kind of formal, well-organized event to welcome the president. It’s the shape of the landscape, in which the child is one of its elements. From this perspective, the violence of this landscape found its path to penetrate the child’s psyche causing the wound in what Abraham and Torok call the “topography” of the child. 6 It is as if at the very beginning of the book Barakat is not only sketching the dynamics of violence in the exterior landscape, but also how the topography of the inner psyche of the child reflects that violence. From that moment, interchanging the violence between the inner topography and its exterior landscape became an inevitable dynamic for the child. This dynamic only made the inner wound deeper, as much of what could be seen as the child’s “stubbornness” was a survival strategy, trying to find a place for expressing the child’s ego: ّ ‫ وكﺎن‬...‫ﺻﺎﺣي‬ ‫ﺗﻠﻚ كﺎﻧﺖ بﺪا�ﺔ اﻟﻌﻨﻒ �ﺎ‬ �‫ﻋ‬ ‫بي‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ف‬ ‫أﺻ� ﻋﻨ�ﻔﺎ‬ ‫ وأن ي‬،‫أن أﺗﺤﻤﻠﻪ ي� ﺧﻀ�ع ﺳﺎﺣﻖ‬ .‫ ﻋﻨ�ﻔﺎ إ� درﺟﺔ ﺗﻔﻮق ﻃﺎﻗﺔ ﻃﻔﻞ‬،‫بﺪوري‬ ‫ بﺪا�ﺔ‬،‫ﺻﺎﺣي‬ ‫ﺗﻠﻚ كﺎﻧﺖ بﺪا�ﺔ اﻟﻌﻨﻒ �ﺎ‬ ‫بي‬ ّ ‫ف‬ ‫اﻟﻄبﺎﺷ� اﻟﻤﻠﻮﻧﺔ ﻣﻦ‬ ‫دﻋﺘي إ� �ﻗﺔ‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ ﻷﻣﻸ ﻣ��ﻌﺎت اﻟﺴﻮر اﻟﺤﺠﺮي �ف‬،‫اﻟﻤﺪرﺳﺔ‬ ‫ي‬ 7 .�‫اﻟﺤﺪ�ﻘﺔ اﻟﻌﺎﻣﺔ ﺣﺮوﻓﺎ � ﺣﺮوف اﺳ‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ي‬ That was the beginning of the violence, my friend... I had to endure it with overwhelming obedience, and consequently, I too had to become violent, violent beyond the endurance of a child. That was the beginning of violence, my friend, the beginning which pushed me to steal the colorful 5 Salim Barakat, al-Siratan, (Dar al-Jadid, 1998), 21. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholy,” The shell and the kernel: renewals of psychoanalysis, (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 127. 7 Barakat, al-Siratan, 22. 6 30 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) chalks from the school and fill the stones of the public garden wall with the letters of my name. The act of filling the garden wall by writing his name fits exactly in the process of introjection: broadening the ego of the child. This broadening the ego could be interpreted in diverse ways: fighting against the wound, resisting the violence of the landscape or even an unconscious call for help. Touching Poetic Ledges through the Deleuzian Repetition In Barakat’s text, there are refrains, repeated phrases that could be seen as signposts in the child’s topography, showing how this topography is reacting to the ecology of the surrounding landscape. The repetition of those refrains uses the narrative voice of the text to a form of a poetic ledge. ...‫ﺻﺎﺣي‬ ‫ﻛﻨﺎ ﺻﻐﺎرا �ﺎ‬ ‫بي‬ We were youngsters, my friend… ...‫ﺗﻠﻚ كﺎﻧﺖ بﺪا�ﺔ‬ That was the beginning of… ...‫وﺿﺎﻗﺖ اﻟبﺪا�ﺔ‬ And the beginning narrowed… As Deleuze mentions in Difference and Repetition, To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound internal repetition within the singular. 8 Those repeated opening phrases give Barakat’s narrative voice a distinctly musical poetic tone, with the effect of echoing a tone and a rhythm that’s full of melancholia, agitation and anger throughout the whole text. Those refrains work as marking important stations or junctions in the narrative, introducing new ideas or significant memories or crucial accidents that are connected to what came before. They are moments/places where the attempt to navigate through the body of the text becomes qualitatively equivalent to the attempt to navigate the child’s internal topography. ...‫ا�ﺴﻌﺖ اﻟبﺪا�ﺔ‬ And the beginning expanded... 8 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2004), 1. 31 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) ‫ ﻣﺜﻞ ﻓﺮاخ‬،‫ ﺻﻐﺎرا ﺟﺪا‬،‫ﺻﺎﺣي‬ ‫ﻛﻨﺎ ﺻﻐﺎرا �ﺎ‬ ‫بي‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ﻃﺮ� اﻟﺸﺎرع ﻛﺴﻄﻮر‬ �‫واﻗﻔن ﻋ‬ ،‫اﻹوز‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ي‬ 9. ‫اﻟ�ﺘﺎبﺔ‬ We were youngsters, my friend, very young, as young as baby geese, standing on the street sides like lines of writing. ‫ ﺻﻐﺎرا �ﺴﻬﺮون اﻟﻠ�ﻞ‬،‫ﺻﺎﺣي‬ ‫ﻛﻨﺎ ﺻﻐﺎرا �ﺎ‬ ‫بي‬ ‫ ﺻﻐﺎرا ﻻ �ﻔﻜﺮون إﻻ‬.‫ﺗﺤﺖ ﻣﺼﺎﺑﻴﺢ اﻟﻄﺮﻗﺎت‬ 10 ‫ف ي� �ﻗﺔ أو ﺧﻄﻒ أو ﺗﺤﻄ�ﻢ‬ We were youngsters, my friend, youngsters who stay up at night under streetlights, youngsters thinking only of stealing or snatching or smashing. ‫ ﺻﻐﺎرا �ﺤﺒﻮن وﺻﻒ‬،‫ﺻﺎﺣي‬ ‫ﻛﻨﺎ ﺻﻐﺎرا �ﺎ‬ ‫بي‬ ‫ف‬ . ‫و� ﺗﻤﻮت ي� بﻂء ﻧﺤﺐ وﺿﻊ‬ ‫اﻟﺤﻴﻮاﻧﺎت ي‬ 11 ‫ورق اﻟﺨﺮﺷﻨﺔ ف� أﻧﻮﻓﻨﺎ ت‬ ‫ﺣي �ﺴ�ﻞ اﻟﺪﻣﺎء‬ ‫ي‬ We were youngsters, my friend, youngsters who loved describing animals in their slow death. We loved putting lottery papers in our noses until the blood flowed. We see the same technique of proliferating refrains with the repetition of “That was the beginning”: ‫ بﺪا�ﺔ‬،‫ﺻﺎﺣي‬ ‫ﺗﻠﻚ كﺎﻧﺖ بﺪا�ﺔ اﻟﻌﻨﻒ �ﺎ‬ ‫بي‬ ‫يف‬ ‫ﺻﻐ�ة ﻗﺮب ﺟبﺎل‬ ‫أﺳﺒﻮﻋن ف ي� ﻣﺪﻳﻨﺔ‬ ‫اﻣﺘﺪت‬ ‫ي‬ 12 . ‫رﺳ� ﻋﻨ�ﻒ‬ ‫ﻃﻮروس؛ بﺪا�ﺔ ﻓ�ح‬ ‫ي‬ That was the beginning of violence, my friend, the beginning which extended for two weeks in a small town adjacent to the Taurus Mountains; the beginning of violent official celebration. ‫ف‬ ‫دﻋﺘي‬ ‫ بﺪا�ﺔ‬،‫ﺻﺎﺣي‬ ‫ﺗﻠﻚ كﺎﻧﺖ بﺪا�ﺔ اﻟﻌﻨﻒ �ﺎ‬ ‫ي‬ ‫بي‬ ‫ ﻷﻣﻸ‬،‫اﻟﻄبﺎﺷ� اﻟﻤﻠﻮﻧﺔ ﻣﻦ اﻟﻤﺪرﺳﺔ‬ ‫إ� �ﻗﺔ‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ﻣ��ﻌﺎت اﻟﺴﻮر اﻟﺤﺠﺮي ي� اﻟﺤﺪ�ﻘﺔ اﻟﻌﺎﻣﺔ‬ � ‫� ﺣﺮوف‬ ‫ وﺣﺮوﻓﺎ أﺧﺮى ي‬،�‫اﺳ‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ﺣﺮوﻓﺎ ي‬ ‫ﺣﺮوف ﺻﻨﻒ اﻟﻘﻠﻢ اﻟﺮﺻﺎص اﻟﺬي أ�ﺘﺐ بﻪ‬ 13 “H. B.” That was the beginning of violence, my friend, which pushed me to steal the colorful chalks from the school and fill the stones of the public garden wall with the letters of my name and letters of my pencil brand “H. B.” Another such refrain is the word “narrowing.” Barakat periodically interrupts the progression of his narrative with this term in order to communicate his way of seeing time. The narrowing finally reaches a suffocating climax: 9 Barakat, al-Siratan, 21. Barakat, al-Siratan, 27. 11 Barakat, al-Siratan, 26. 12 Barakat, al-Siratan, 21. 13 Barakat, al-Siratan, 22. 10 32 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) ‫ ﺿﺎﻗﺖ‬.‫ﻟﺘﺼ� كﺎ ﱠﻟﺮﺳﻦ‬ ‫وﺿﺎﻗﺖ اﻟبﺪا�ﺔ‬ ‫ي‬ 14. ‫اﻟﺼﻐ�ة اﻟﻤﺘﺎﺧﻤﺔ ﻟﺠبﺎل ﻃﻮروس‬ ‫اﻟﻤﺪﻳﻨﺔ‬ ‫ي‬ And the beginning was narrowing until it became as a halter. The small town that’s adjacent to Taurus Mountains was also narrowing. �‫أ‬ ‫ بﺪأت ي‬:‫ وﺗﻀﻴﻖ اﻟبﺪا�ﺔ‬،‫وﺗﻀﻴﻖ اﻟﻄﻔﻮﻟﺔ‬ ‫ ﻋﻨ�ﻒ‬،‫ﺷيﺌﺎ ﺟﺪ�ﺪا ﻟﻢ �ﻜﻦ ف ي� اﻟﺤﺴبﺎن‬ ‫ ﻣﻤﻨ�ع أن‬.‫ اﻷ�ﺮاد ﺧﻄﺮون‬.‫ أﻧﺖ ﻛﺮدي‬:‫وﺻﺎرخ‬ 15. ‫ﺗﺘﺤﺪث بﺎﻟ�ﺮد�ﺔ ف ي� اﻟﻤﺪرﺳﺔ‬ … And the childhood was narrowing, the beginning was narrowing, I began to realize something new that wasn’t on my mind before, a violent and outrageous thing: You are a Kurd. Kurds are dangerous. It’s forbidden to speak in Kurdish in the school. ‫ وﻣﻊ‬،‫ واﻟبﺪا�ﺔ ﺗﻀﻴﻖ‬،‫أﻧﺖ ﻃﻔﻞ بﻼ ﻃﻔﻮﻟﺔ‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ت‬ ‫اﻟي رﻓﻌﺖ‬ ‫اﻟبﺪا�ﺔ ي‬ ‫ ﺛﻠ�ج اﻟﺴﻨﺔ ذاﺗﻬﺎ ي‬،‫ﺗﺄي اﻟﺜﻠ�ج‬ 16. ‫ﻟﻤ�ء اﻟﺮﺋ�ﺲ‬ ‫ﻓﻴﻬﺎ ذراﻋ�ﻚ ﺗﺤ�ﺔ ﻋﻨ�ﻔﺔ ب ي‬ You are a child without childhood, and the beginning was narrowing, and with the beginning comes snow, the snow of that same year when you raised your arms in a violent salute to welcome the president. Barakat uses the opposing term, “expanding,” in the same way. When the child is surrounded, he becomes uncontainable and overwhelming: ‫وا�ﺴﻌﺖ اﻟبﺪا�ﺔ؛ ا�ﺴﻌﺖ ﻛﺪواﺋﺮ اﻟﻤﺎء ف ي� ﺑﺮﻛﺔ‬ 17. ‫رﻣﻮﻫﺎ بﺤﺠﺮ‬ The beginning expanded; expanded like circles of water in a pond in which a stone was thrown. ،‫اﻟ�ﺮاﻫ�ﺔ‬ ‫ وا�ﺴﻌﺖ‬،‫وا�ﺴﻌﺖ اﻟبﺪا�ﺔ‬ ‫واﺳﺘﻔﺤﻠﺖ اﻟﻌﺪاوة ﺑيﻨﻨﺎ ي ف‬ ‫و�ن أﻣﻨﺎ‬ 18. And the beginning expanded, and hatred expanded and the animosity between us and our mother was overwhelming. The fluctuation between “expanding” and “narrowing” is drawing the violence in those shifts between different spots inside the child’s topography: “Expanding” here reflects that overwhelming nature of the violence toward the child from the school, the mother, and the father. “Narrowing” here shows the oppression the child experienced not just against him in-person but against every Kurdish thing in that landscape. The violence in that shifting in 14 Barakat, al-Siratan, 25. Barakat, al-Siratan, 28. 16 Barakat, al-Siratan, 31. 17 Barakat, al-Siratan, 24. 18 Barakat, al-Siratan, 24. 15 33 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) his inner topography echoes the violence from the outside landscape. This deeply physical violence goes in both directions, against the child, and from him against the “other.” Here, Deleuze may be recalled again, If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, and instantaneity opposed to variation, and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition is a transgression. It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favor of a more profound and more artistic reality. 19 overall rhythm of the text. Sometimes all those voices gather in his narration of a single scene. ،‫أ� ﺷيﺌﺎ ﺟﺪ�ﺪا ﻟﻢ �ﻜﻦ ف ي� اﻟﺤﺴبﺎن‬ ‫بﺪأت ي‬ .‫ اﻷ�ﺮاد ﺧﻄﺮون‬.‫ أﻧﺖ ﻛﺮدي‬:‫ﻋﻨ�ﻒ وﺻﺎرخ‬ ... ‫ﻣﻤﻨ�ع أن ﺗﺘﺤﺪث بﺎﻟ�ﺮد�ﺔ ف ي� اﻟﻤﺪرﺳﺔ‬ I began to realize something new that wasn’t on my mind before, a violent and outrageous thing: You are a Kurd. Kurds are dangerous. It’s forbidden to speak Kurdish in the school…. (Narrating in first person) ‫ إﻧﻬﻢ �ﻜﺮﻫﻮﻧﻚ‬.�‫أﻧﺖ ﻃﻔﻞ ﻟ�ﻨﻚ ﻟﺴﺖ أﻋ‬ ‫ اﻟﻤﻌﻠﻢ �ﻜﺮﻫﻚ‬.‫ وﻻ ﺗﺪري ﻟﻤﺎذا‬،‫ﺳﻠﻔﺎ‬ ‫ش‬ ... � ‫و�ﻜﺮﻫﻚ ﻣﻮﻇﻒ اﻟﺪوﻟﺔ واﻟ� ي‬ You are a child but not blind. They hate you in advance and you don’t know why. The teacher hates you, and government employee and policeman hate you… (Talking to the child) Violent Shifting between Narrative Modes Rhythm, which is always present in discussions around poeticism, doesn’t only refer to vocals in this case, but also to all the other linguistic elements of the text: lexical, synthetic, and prosaic. 20 One of the rhythmic elements can be seen in Barakat’s use of different approaches to narration. Sometimes he talks to the reader, sometimes he talks to the child in himself, and at other times he narrates as a storyteller. Through the whole work, he moves between all these narrative modes, creating shifts in voice, tone, and the 19 20 � ‫ف‬ ‫ﻳنب� ﺗﺠﺎە‬ ‫ ﻋﻨ�ﻔﺎ أ�� ﻣﻤﺎ ي‬،‫ﻓﻸ�ﻦ ﻋﻨ�ﻔﺎ إذا‬ ‫ف‬ .‫اﻟﺸ�ﻄﺎي‬ ‫ﻫﺬە اﻻﻗﺘﺤﺎم‬ ‫ي‬ So I will be violent, more violent than is necessary to face this infernal violation. (Narrating in first person) Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 2-3 Kazim Jihad, Hissat al-Gharib, (Beirut: Dar al-Jamal, 2007), 140. 34 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) The violence he refers to at the end of this paragraph is reflected in the violent shifts here between narrative modes, as if the child can’t settle in one position in his inner topography while the outside landscape is suffocating him wherever he stands. That violence he is performing in his Arabic narrative, written as it is in the official language, could be read as response against the official rejection of him. We see the same violence in shifts between the narrative modes in another scene that itself describes a violent incident: ‫ﺗﻨﻈﺮ بﺪورك إ� أﻃﻔﺎل اﻟبﺪو ش ف‬ �‫�را ف ي‬ ‫ �ﺴﺨﺮ ﻣﻦ اﻟﺤﻼﻗﺔ اﻟﻐ��بﺔ‬.‫اﻟﻤﺪرﺳﺔ‬ �‫�ﻐ‬ ‫ وﻣﻦ اﻟﻮﺷﻢ اﻷزرق اﻟﺬي‬،‫ﻟﺸﻌﺮﻫﻢ‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ وﻣﻦ بﺪاﺋيﺘﻬﻢ‬،‫أﻧﻮﻓﻬﻢ وﺧﺪودﻫﻢ وأ�ﺪﻳﻬﻢ‬ 21 …‫اﻟﻤﻔﺮﻃﺔ‬ You look, in turn, disdainfully at the Bedouin children in the school, laughing at their strange haircuts and the blue tattoos covering their noses, cheeks and hands and their extreme wildness… (Talking to the child) ‫ ﻟ�ﻦ واﻟﺪك‬...‫�ﺤﺘﻘﺮە اﻟﻨﺎﻇﺮ ﻟﻠ�ﻨﺘﻪ اﻷﻋﺠﻤ�ﺔ‬ ‫ "ﻣﻦ أﻧﺖ‬:‫ �ﻘﻮل ﻟﻠﻨﺎﻇﺮ‬...‫ﻛ��ﺎء‬ ‫ﻋﻨ�ﻒ ذو ب‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ "رب‬:‫ �ﻘﻮل اﻟﻨﺎﻇﺮ‬،‫ﻟﺘﺨﺎﻃﺒي ﻫﻜﺬا؟‬ ‫ي‬ 22 ... ّ " ‫ر�ﻚ‬ …The headmaster insults him because of the foreign accent of his Arabic… (Narrating as a storyteller about his father who was insulted) …but your father is violent and has pride… (talking to himself as a child) …He says to the headmaster: “Who are you to talk to me in this way?” and the headmaster says: “God of your god…” (Narrating as a storyteller) ‫ �ﺼﻞ اﻷﻣﺮ إ� ﻣﺪﻳﺮ‬...‫�ﻐﺎدر واﻟﺪي ﻏﺎﺿبﺎ‬ ‫ﱢ‬ ‫ﱢ‬ ‫ت‬ �‫�ﺄي اﻟﻤﻘﺪم ف ي‬ ‫ ي‬.‫ وﻫﻮ ﺑﺮﺗبﺔ ﻣﻘﺪم‬،‫اﻟﻤﻨﻄﻘﺔ‬ ‫يف‬ :‫ﺻﺎرﺧﺎ‬ ‫ ﻓ�ﺨ�ج إﻟ�ﻪ‬،‫ﺳ�ﺎرة ﻓﺨﻤﺔ‬ � ‫ﺣﺴن آﻏﺎ‬ ّ ‫"ﺳﺄدوس‬ ،‫ﻗبﻌﺘﻚ إذا أﺧﺬت ﻫﺬا اﻟﺮﺟﻞ‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ف‬ ّ ‫و� ﻫﺪوء ﻳﺘﺨ� اﻟﻨﺎﻇﺮ‬ ‫ ي‬،‫و�ﺴﻮى اﻷﻣﺮ ي� ﻫﺪوء‬ 23 �‫ﺗنﺘ‬ ‫ ﻟ�ﻦ اﻟﻤﺴﺄﻟﺔ ﻻ‬،‫ﻋﻦ ﻋﺪاﺋيﺘﻪ‬ ‫ي‬ …My father left angry (Narrating in the first person) …The district manager, who was a major, knew about the issue and came in his expensive car. Husayn Agha came out to him, screaming: “I will trample your cap if you take this man,” and everything was handled after that, quietly. And, quietly, the headmaster stopped being hostile, but the issue didn’t end… (Narrating as a storyteller) ‫ت‬ ‫اﻟي‬ ‫ وﻛﺬﻟﻚ اﻟبﺪا�ﺔ ي‬،‫ﻓﺘﺼﺒﺢ اﻟﻄﻔﻮﻟﺔ ﺟﺤ�ﻤﺎ‬ 24. ‫اﻟﺼﻐ� ي ف‬ ‫ﺗن ﻟﻠﺮﺋ�ﺲ‬ ‫ّﻟﻮﺣﺖ ﻓﻴﻬﺎ ﺑ�ﺪ�ﻚ‬ ‫ي‬ 21 Barakat, al-Siratan, 29. Barakat, al-Siratan, 29. 23 Barakat, al-Siratan, 29-30. 24 Barakat, al-Siratan, 30. 22 35 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) …so childhood became a hell, and also that beginning in which you waved with your small hands to the president. (Talking to the child) By the end of that scene, everything is obvious to the child; the wound is going to be deeper and there’s no space to mourn what you used to have. Here, paradoxically, the violent melancholia is what could make the child survive; the violence here dominating the child’s fantasies trying to fill this deep wound in his ego that he wasn’t able to broaden. Conclusion: Ecological Landscape as a Reflection of Inner Topography One of the main elements of Salim’s style is his comprehensive engagement with his surrounding ecological landscape: the mountain, the lake, birds, animals, plants. In this engagement, we see violent interactions between that outer landscape and the child’s inner topographical psyche, reflecting on each other in both directions, from outside to inside and vice versa: ‫ف‬ ‫اﻟﻄﺎ� اﻟﺬي‬ ‫ ﺗﺤﺐ ﻫﺬا اﻟﻠﻮن‬،‫أﻧﺖ ﺗﺤﺐ اﻟﺜﻠﺞ‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ ﺗﺤﺐ اﻣﺘﺪادە واﻣﺘﺪاد‬،‫�ﺴﻄﻮ ﻋ� كﻞ اﻷﻟﻮان‬ ‫ ﻷﻧﻚ ي ف‬،‫ ﻟ�ﻨﻪ �ﻌﻘﺪ اﻷﻣﻮر ﻗﻠ�ﻼ‬.‫ﺧﻄﺎك ﻓ�ﻪ‬ ‫ﺣن‬ ‫ واﺑﺘﻞ‬،‫ﺗﺪﺧﻞ اﻟﺒ�ﺖ وﻗﺪ اﻣﺘﻸ ﺣﺬاؤك بﺎﻟﺜﻠﺞ‬ �‫ ﺗﻐﺎﻓﻞ أﻣﻚ ﻟﺘﻀﻊ اﻟﺠﻮرب ﻋ‬،‫ﺟﻮر�ﻚ‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ وﻻ ف‬،‫اﻟﻤﺪﻓﺄة ﺗﻤﺎﻣﺎ‬ .‫و�ﺤ�ق‬ ‫ﺗﻤ� دﻗﺎﺋﻖ إﻻ‬ ‫ي‬ .‫ ﺗﻬﺮب ﻣﻦ اﻟﺒ�ﺖ ﺧﻮف اﻟﻘﺼﺎص‬،‫ أ�ﻀﺎ‬،‫وﻫﻨﺎ‬ ...‫ﺗﻬﺮب إ� اﻟﺜﻠﺞ اﻟبﺎرد وﺗﺮﺗﺠﻒ وﺗﺮﺗﺠﻒ‬ 25 . ‫ �ﺸﺘﻢ اﻟﺒ�ﺖ وﻻ ﺗﺤبﻪ‬.‫�ﺸﺘﻢ اﻟﺜﻠﺢ وﺗﺤبﻪ‬ 25 You loved snow, loved that overwhelming color which subdued all colors. You loved its expansion and your footsteps on it. But snow complicated things a little bit, because when you go inside the house with your shoes full of snow, and your socks wet, you tried to put the socks directly on the heater, without your mother noticing. Only few minutes after that and you find the socks were on fire. And here, also, you’d run away from the house in fear of punishment. You ran out in the cold snow, shivering and shivering… You curse the snow and love it. You curse the home and don’t love it. The elegiac tone in the child’s reception of the purity, innocence of the whiteness of the snow reflects his searching for a childhood where he can broaden his ego. But the effect of being immersed in that broadening scene brings a violent reaction, so escaping to the snow is not the solution, cursing yourself is not the solution. In the same paragraph, we see the use of the verb “withdraw” ‫ ﺗﻨﻄﻮي‬drawing an image of a space, a corner of which the child is hiding himself in. The space becomes narrower, the child’s topography is suffocated and the depth of the wound is irremediable, a wound that we see a manifestation of in the physical gestures of the others against the child: Barakat, al-Siratan, 31 36 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) ‫ف‬ ‫ﺗ�ب أﺧﻮﺗﻚ ﻷﻧﻬﻢ �ﻔﺴﺪون اﻟﺴﻄﺢ اﻷﻣﻠﺲ‬ .‫ﻟﻠﺜﻠﺞ ف ي� بﺎﺣﺔ اﻟﺒ�ﺖ وﻫﻢ �ﻌﺒﺜﻮن‬ ،‫وأﺧ�ا‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ ي ف‬،‫ ﺣ��ﻨﺎ ﺟﺪا‬،‫ﺗﻨﻄﻮي ف� زاو�ﺔ ﻣﺎ‬ ‫وﺣن ﻻ‬ ‫ي‬ �‫ﺗﻌﺮف ﻛ�ﻒ ﺗﺤﺪدا ﺳبﺐ ﻟﺤﺰﻧﻚ ﺗﻌﻮد إ‬ ‫ و�ﺴ�ﻞ‬،‫ ﻓﺘﺘﻠﻘﻔﻚ اﻷ�ﺪي‬،‫اﻟﺒ�ﺖ ﻣﺴتﺴﻠﻤﺎ‬ 26 . ‫ أﻧﺖ اﻟﻄﻔﻞ‬،‫ﻣﻦ أﻧﻔﻚ اﻟﺪم‬ You hit your brothers because they mess up the smooth surface of the snow in the house yard when they played. Eventually you withdraw, sad in a corner, and when you couldn’t determine a reason for your sadness, you go back into the house in surrender. Thus, the hands grab you there and bleeding comes down from your nose, you, the child. The last paragraph in this chapter is in some way a dawning moment when the incorporation process of filling the wound with fantasies about exploding everything faces the reality of its failure against the depth of the wound: ‫ت‬ �‫ﺗﻘ�ب ﻣﻦ اﻟﻤﺪﻓﺄة ﻟﺘﻔﺘﺢ ﻣﺴ�ﻞ اﻟﻤﺎزوت ﻋ‬ ‫ وﺗﻀﺞ اﻟﻤﺪﻓﺄة وﺗﺤﻤﺮ ﻛﺮأس ﻟﻔﺎﻓﺔ‬،‫آﺧﺮە‬ ‫ وﻫﻨﺎ ف‬.‫واﻟﺪك‬ ‫ أن ﺗﻨﻔﺠﺮ‬،‫ﺗﺘﻤي أن ﻳﺰداد اﻟﻮﻫﺞ‬ ُ ‫ش‬ ‫�ء‬ ‫ ﻟ�ﻦ ﻻ ي‬،‫ﺤﺮق اﻟﺒ�ﺖ‬ � ‫اﻟﻤﺪﻓﺄة وﺗ‬ 27 . ‫�ﺤﺼﻞ‬ You approach the heater to open the oil tap all the way. The heater becomes hotter, like the head of your father’s cigarette. In that moment, you wish the heat would 26 27 go up, the heater would explode and burn down the house, but nothing happens. It is a moment of collapse and survival of the psyche at the same time. It’s a collapse because the incorporation is not able to fill the wound, and it is a survival because merely by realizing that failure, his ecological landscape became a mirror for his inner topography: ‫ ﺗﺘﻔﺠﺮ ﻃﻔﻮﻟﺘﻚ ﻃﻴﻨﺎ وﻃﻴﻮرا‬،‫بﻞ ﺗﺘﻔﺠﺮ أﻧﺖ‬ ‫ ﺗﺘﻔﺠﺮ ﻃﻔﻮﻟﺘﻚ ﺧﻄﺎﻓﺎت‬.‫ﻋﺎر�ﺔ ﻣﻴﺘﺔ‬ ‫يف‬ ‫ وﺛ�ﺎبﺎ‬،‫ وﺟﺮارا ﻣﻜﺴﻮرة‬،‫وﺳكﺎ�ن‬ ‫ﺣﺪ�ﺪ�ﺔ‬ ‫ و�ﻄ�ﺨﺎ‬،‫ و�ﻨﺎدق ﺻ�ﺪ‬،‫ وﻓﺨﺎﺧﺎ‬،‫ﻣﻠﻮﺛﺔ بﺎﻟﺪم‬ ‫أﺣﻤﺮ ُﻣﻬﺸﻤﺎ ﻋ� اﻷرﺻﻔﺔ‬ It was just you who have been exploding; your childhood that has been exploding with mud and naked dead birds, exploding with steel hooks, knives, broken crocks, blood-stained clothes, traps, shooting guns and red watermelons smashed on pavements. This end of the chapter embodies a duality of exhaustion and realization, but it was not possible to reach this exhaustion/realization without beating a heavy, narrow path: in this case, the act of writing itself, or more precisely, to write one’s own autobiography very early in life. This childhood autobiography is also Barakat’s first prose work after ten years of writing only poetry, and before he Barakat, al-Siratan, 32. Barakat, al-Siratan, 32. 37 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) wrote any novels, as if he (the writer inside him) would not be able to write what is fiction without putting out what is real. Writing this narrative here is an incalculable step. It carries in its own nature the possibility of collapsing or finding some form of survival by looking at one’s own wound without any fantasies. With such an act, both outcomes are equally likely. Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy is a PhD candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. His English translation of Barakat’s The Iron Grasshopper is forthcoming from Seagull Books. References: Abraham, Nicolas, and Torok, Maria. “Mourning or Melancholy.” The shell and the kernel: renewals of psychoanalysis. University of Chicago Press, 1994, 125-138. Barakat, Salim. al-Siratan. Dar al-Jadid, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of The Translator.” Reflections. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Darwish, Mahmoud. La taʻtadhir ʻamma faʻalt, Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2004. Jihad, Kazim. Hissat al-Gharib. Beirut: Dar al-Jamal, 2007. 38 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Research Notes: Studying the Syria Crisis of 1957 Gabriel Odom (Texas State University) [email protected] Abstract Studying Syria during the Cold War is a difficult task for many historians due to the scattering of physical sources, their inconsistent digitization, and the lack of primary sources from the Syrian perspective. This article seeks to outline some of the resources available to historians of Syria in the United States through the lens of research into the Syria Crisis of 1957. This study outlines both digital and non-digital sources, and serves as a guide for the novice historian to which sources can be used for what purpose. Studying the Syrian Crisis of 1957 in the United States is not an easy task. It is made especially difficult by Syria’s antagonistic relationship with the United States, the authoritarian nature of its government, and the devastation caused by the Syrian Civil War. Accessing the Syrian perspective on these events is challenging. However, studying Syria during the Cold War has also become easier in recent years due to the declassification of documents as well as the uncovering of new sources of information in the United States. This article surveys institutions in the United States that could be helpful to researchers of Syrian history, specifically Cold War history. Historians who study the 1957 crisis and the Eisenhower Doctrine more broadly tend to focus on a few key themes. The first is the covert actions the CIA carried out in the region. This is understandable, since these actions are what sparked the crisis in the first place. Covert activity is an attractive topic for any historian of the Cold War - the suitcase stuffed with CIA cash being handed off to foreign army officers makes for good reading. The outlandish plans of the CIA and MI6, tribal uprisings, border skirmishes, bloody palace coups - studying these provide a glimpse into the multitude of strategies the US were willing to employ to achieve strategic outcomes. 1 Eisenhower was famous for his disdain for armed intervention. Throughout his presidency, he generally refrained from engaging 1 Douglas Little, “Cold War and Covert Action: The United States and Syria, 1945-1958,” Middle East Journal 44, no. 1 (January 1, 1990): 51–75. 39 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) directly in conflicts abroad (Lebanon in 1958 being a prominent exception to this). entry point, but the serious researcher must go farther. Historians also tend to apply the themes of containment and brinkmanship to the crisis. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower Administration shared the same perspective as the Truman Administration, viewing communism as a virus, a disease that could hop borders and destabilize entire regions. 2 That is why the “northern ring” - Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan - was so important to the United States. The United States acquiesced to the formation of the United Arab Republic just a few months after the crisis because they believed that Egypt’s Nasser could keep the Soviets at a distance, due to his popularity in the Arab world. 3 In turn, the Soviet Union often responded to the U.S.’s efforts at containment with brinkmanship – threatening to attack Turkey in 1957, and moving nuclear weapons to the U.S.’s doorstep in Cuba a few years later, touching off the Cuban Missile Crisis. The John Foster Dulles Collection at Princeton has a wide variety of undigitized documents from Dulles’ tenure as secretary of state valuable to any scholar studying the US-Syria relationship during the 1950s. Another useful source is the Digital National Security Archive at George Washington University. The archive is a digitized collection of thousands of declassified national security documents spanning decades. The archive aggressively seeks to declassify documents that the federal government would rather not come to light. Like The Foreign Relations of the United States, it is keyword searchable. The fact that this archive is not administered by the U.S. government makes it useful for studying covert matters, since the State Department, the CIA, the NSA, and other agencies are not always forthcoming about more sordid aspects of their past. Getting the American perspective on Syria is possible but not always easy. The published volumes of The Foreign Relations of the United States is the first stop for many. They are easily accessible, organized, and largely digitized. But while these records are helpful, they are not a complete collection of all documents created during an administration, but a particular selection. They serve as a useful Another helpful resource is the archive of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. The FBIS was operated by the CIA for the purposes of monitoring foreign media, including looking for clandestine and coded messages. For the academic, the FBIS archive is a fantastic collection because it has scans of newspapers from all over the world. For the study of Syria, its records of the Soviet TASS and Israeli newspapers is particularly valuable. FBIS is 2 David W. Lesch, Syria and the United States: Eisenhower’s Cold War in the Middle East, (Westview Press, 1992) 3 Lesch, Syria and the United States, 202 40 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) an excellent source for non-American media and for the Syrian government’s public diplomacy, as figures in their government interacted with media across the Arab and non-aligned world. The FBIS is generally accessible through university libraries. For American media sources, Proquest Historical Newspapers is useful. Reviewing American newspapers from the period of the 1957 crisis is helpful in understanding how Eisenhower and Dulles presented the crisis to the public, and how the wider public reacted to the crisis. A great advantage of this collection is that it is digitized and keyword searchable. The disadvantage with these sources, as with any information released to the public, is that they often lacked depth. The scale of American covert involvement in Syria was hidden for many years. Researchers remained unaware of the joint CIA-MI6 plot in Syria until it was discovered in the papers of the ex-Foreign Minister Duncan Sandys in 2003. 4 Nevertheless, the collection is helpful for understanding how the public understood the crisis. For any researcher of American history, the National Archives is essential. The National Archives, besides having a fantastic museum in Washington DC, have a wide variety of physical documents relating to Syria at its campus in College Park, Maryland. This center is quite easy to get to, and it is free and open to the public with an appointment. For studying the 1957 crisis, the National Archives hold relevant documents from the U.S. Army and the Navy, as well as documents from various agencies like the Department of Commerce. The National Archives is also the main repository for archival records from the State Department through 1979, and has a scattering of records from the CIA that may not show up elsewhere. Finally, an important stop for researchers of the 1957 crisis is the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas. Many published articles and books on the crisis reference documents which are stored here. The library holds countless undigitized documents, and the archivists are very helpful. When I emailed an archivist at the Library asking for information about their resources, they responded with a dossier on dozens of well-organized boxes pertaining to the crisis, with titles such as “Meetings with the President- 1957 (3) [Middle East; Syria].” The problem with this resource is the Eisenhower Library is not exactly in a metropolitan travel hub, so transportation can be difficult, and if one is looking for something in particular, it is difficult to know in advance whether or not the library has the answer. Travel grants are available for researchers wishing to do work at the Eisenhower Library. In conclusion, studying the Syria Crisis of 1957 and Syria more broadly from the 4 Matthew Jones. “The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957.” Intelligence and National Security 19 iii (January 1, 2004): 401–15. 41 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) United States is difficult because of the lack of Syrian records. Visiting Syria is hazardous, and even if one could go there, getting access to sensitive information is nearly impossible. But in the United States, there are a multitude of resources available to the determined researcher both online and offline, and a visit to certain locations could provide a shocking amount of new information. Gabriel Odom is a graduate student in history at Texas State University. 42 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Book Reviews Max Weiss, Revolutions Aesthetic – a Cultural History of Ba‘thist Syria. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. Reviewed by Lovisa Berg [email protected] In Revolutions Aesthetic – a Cultural History of Ba‘thist Syria, Max Weiss aims at presenting “a fresh cultural and intellectual history of Ba‘thist Syria, paying specific attention to the literary and cinematic realms” (p. 43). This is not a small task to take on but Weiss, who has researched Syria and the Levant for many years, manages to present both general themes as well as precise details from the Syrian literary and artistic scene. As the title indicates, ideas of “revolution” have had a reoccurring influence on intellectuals and their aesthetic expression in Syria from the Ba‘th revolution of 1963 until the 2011 uprising, the last era to be discussed in the book. Without denying that art and culture were and are often used as soft power by the Syrian regime, Weiss negates the one-dimensional view of Syrian cultural life as solely producing propaganda for the Ba‘th party. He delineates the ambiguous relationship between the regime and artists from the viewpoint that the regime wants to speak to and for the public through art(ists), whereas the artists themselves rather speak against and with (p. 2). The negotiation between the two sides forms the core of the analysis. The exploration of the novels and films is grounded in a critical-historical reading, in addition to theories of aesthetics and power, and refers to thinkers such as Jacques Rancière, Sianne Ngai, Terry Eagelton and Hannah Arendt, as well as researchers on Syria and Syrian literature and drama. The book is divided into six dense chapters – or maybe seven is closer to the truth, since the conclusion can be read as a freestanding chapter rather than an actual conclusion of the previous sections. In each chapter, three or four writers or filmmakers are discussed. The analysed texts and films give a good understanding of the complexities of Syrian cultural production in addition to presenting telling examples of the varying aesthetics seen over the decades. The novels and films that are selected serve the purpose of their inclusion. The authors and scriptwriters are all well-known names inside Syria, and most of them can be found among the few Syrian writers taught in Western universities. Even though it is not possible to overlook their importance, a greater variety and an addition of less internationally well-known authors would have strengthened the discussion further. The book would also have benefitted from a bibliography. As it is now, a reader needs to look through the endnotes to find 43 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) information about the substantial number of sources, both in English and in Arabic, that are referred to. The same applies to information about the novels and films that form the core of the various chapters. The material is structured in a chronological order and each era is discussed through a topic considered dominant of the time. The two first chapters explore aesthetic expressions under the rule of Hafiz al-Asad and what Weiss terms Cultural Asadism (p. 44). Themes examined are the hero figure in literature and its relation to the role of the president – the eternal leader – as well as the interrelated problems of violence, power, and masculinity. The two chapters explore how writers and filmmakers in the 70s and 80s grappled with feelings of defeat paired with hope of a new beginning and how this affected their artistic expression and choice of themes and motives. The third chapter deals with the oeuvre of Durayd Lahham, one of Syria’s more wellknown comedians, and his shifting career, from being hailed as a critical voice to being seen as a regime supporter. Through Lahham’s films, which were highly popular within Syria and in other Arab countries, Weiss discusses the reflective power of film and the relationship between the general public and critical cultural expression. The fourth chapter engages with cultural production from 2000-2010, the first ten years of Bashar al-Asad’s rule. Although the great hopes for liberal reform that accompanied Bashar’s ascent to power never came true, the themes and topics of films and novels in Syria somehow became more daring. One example of this is the subject explored throughout the chapter, namely that of the surveillance apparatus and the security state and its appearance in novels and films. The works examined show that fictionalized descriptions of intelligence agencies serve to “distance, objectify and reimagine the brutality of state power” (p. 226). The final two chapters and the conclusion explore the Syrian literary and cinematic scene after 2011. The fifth chapter focuses on accounts of the first days of the uprising, while the sixth chapter explores “macabre sights and graphic depictions of revolution, war, and violence in text and image” (p. 269). The chapters show how authors and filmmakers of this era approach new topics such as sectarianism, a central theme in everyday Syrian life but one that for long has subject to an absolute taboo, and historical brutalities committed by the regime but written out of the communal history. The post-2011 period can furthermore be seen as an updated version of social realism, where writers articulate what they see both to document historical happenings and to form a platform for change and thus become what Weiss calls witness-narrators (p. 266). The conclusion returns to the ambiguous position of culture makers within a dictatorial state. It compares documentaries produced with the support of the regime in different decades, showing 44 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) how their aesthetic expressions have varied. and political Lovisa Berg is a Senior Lecturer in Arabic and the head of the Arabic Department at Dalarna University in Falun, Sweden. The conclusion ends with a discussion of a novel that returns to, and reinterprets, historical events in the light of the uprising. It is a suitable example of how the struggle over the conditions of possibility for creative expression and meaning making have changed over the years in Syria (p. 340) and how writers adapt to the changing times and explore ways to creatively articulate their understanding of society. Through these six chapters and conclusion, it becomes clear that the tension between aesthetics of power and aesthetics of solidarity and resistance (p. 329) is part of what makes Syrian literary and cinematic expression so fascinating. Weiss’ selected areas of investigation provide an insight into the richness of Syrian cultural life and the depth and width of its literature and cinema. This volume brings a much needed perspective, and is a refreshing and welltimed contribution to the academic and critical conversation on the literary, intellectual, and political landscape of modern and contemporary Syria. Through its analysis of “revolutions aesthetics,” it not only shows the redemptive and productive power of culture in Syrian society, but moreover introduces readers to a relatively unknown aspect of contemporary Syria, one that is well-worth exploring further, as Weiss also points out in the concluding section. 45 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Matthieu Rey, When Parliaments Ruled the Middle East: Iraq and Syria, 1946–63. Cairo, American University in Cairo Press, 2022. Reviewed by David Motzafi-Haller [email protected] “Since the reign of Faisal I and the 1920s,” writes historian Matthieu Rey in this stimulating study of parliamentary history, “the Syrian and Iraqi trajectories have never been entirely independent of each other.” (p. 118) Rey doesn’t explain what he means by “entirely independent,” however. Are there any two nation-states whose trajectories can be said to be entirely independent of each other, let alone two post-colonial neighbors? But the basic point about the adjacency and intertwinement of Syrian and Iraqi political history proves unobtrusively generative. Indeed, dedicating his political history of parliamentarism equally to two case studies, Iraq and Syria, is only one of Rey’s good decisions. The other relates to periodization. His period of study spans what he calls “the long 1950s.” Most historians of Iraqi and Syrian history have seen these 17 years as a period of transition from empire to nation-states. Narrated as the final stages of the long twilight of Ottomanism or as the shaking off of the last vestiges of European imperialist rule, the period starting after World War II and ending in the Ba‘thist revolutions of 1963 is rarely seen as a cohesive one for historical analysis. With its irregular coup d’etats, anti-monarchical revolutions and short-lived unifications, it has variously been depicted as a necessary stage of ripening and identity searching before post-colonial Arab states could really come onto their own. The established leftist historiography of Syria had likewise marginalized the long 1950s, seeing it as little more than a prelude to the anticolonial revolutionary Ba‘thist regimes of the mid-1960s onwards. In foregrounding the long 1950s, and looking simultaneously at Syria and Iraq, Rey sets up two key parameters which make his study a unique contribution to the field. Rey’s book is an important read to anyone interested in Syrian political history. Much energy has been wasted on arguing with culturalist explanations of why parliamentary systems have failed to take root in Arab and Muslim countries. Rey acknowledges this and fittingly bypasses such superficial scholarship altogether. But he minces no words when he holds serious historians accountable for the consignation of the liberal age in Iraq and Syria to damnatio memoriae. Hannah Batuta and Albert Hourani, he writes, did not simply overlook a history of the liberal order of the parliamentary systems – they effectively “refused” to narrate it. In keeping the political project of the “old classes” out of his foundational political history of 20th century Iraq, Rey accuses Batuta of the kind of “nationalistic” and “revolutionary” bias in Middle East historiography that is most responsible for this oversight. Hourani’s choice to end his history of liberalism in Political Arab thought on the eve of World War II similarly represents a failure to 46 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 26: Number 1 (Fall 2022) challenge this tendency. Also responsible is Jacques Berque, whose study, unimpressively, “follow[ed] the official position of leading parties of the time” and didn’t engage seriously with the period. In taking this up as his subject matter, Rey does more than just adding this important episode onto our shelves. Rather, he takes on the ambitious task of offering a new interpretation of the political history in Iraq and Syria altogether. His richly textured and very orderly book analyzes the ripples of regional and global events and forces in local architectures of power but is also sufficiently grounded in local institutional and social realities to show us their effects on actors and on-going processes in Syria’s villages, cities, and the halls of its legislature. Doing so effectively, Rey writes, means “defin[ing] a new chronological pattern for Iraqi and Syrian history” (p. 15). No less. The long 1950s were When Parliaments Ruled the Middle East. During this time, the scions of Iraq and Syria’s patrician families built political institutions and shared power, governing through parliamentary debate and deliberation. Rey’s parliamentarians – unsurprisingly, perhaps – all believed that constitutionalism, the rule of law, and power-sharing among elites were the best way to govern states which still lacked the political infrastructure with which to attain “full sovereignty.” Patronage and semifeudalism in the Syrian countryside and, in the Iraqi case, the introduction of revenues from petrol sales insulated political elites, providing them with the time and the resources they needed to build up governance institutions, political parties and the organs of civil society. Not having to contend with the full force of popular participation as they carried out their project of enfranchisement, education and development meant that parliamentarians were something akin to philosopher kings. Rey concedes this point in an untypically obtuse passage. “Tensions remained,” he writes, “between a set of practices that led to the exclusion of the majority of the population and the ideal, defended by the liberals, that ‘the people’ be given the right to voice their opinion” (p. 13). This “ideals versus practice” framework is one of Rey’s few unguarded moments in an otherwise work of piercing historical analysis. One piece of evidence that Rey gives to illustrate this exclusion from participatory democracy was the practice of holding informal discussions between candidates for jobs and hiring officers, permitting the latter to “hand-pick” men who shared their ideas about key political issues. While it is an important and highly visible form of everyday state-sponsored discrimination, it hardly accounts for the full effect that large-scale clientelism has on democratic participation, nor how it hollows out much of the nominal prerogatives of citizenship. Rey’s analysis is at its best when he maps out the constitutive tensions and forces of parliamentary political life. As he leads us through seemingly endless political intrigue, he reminds us that it was how “actors interacted with […] events rather than the changes themselves that effected 47 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) the parliamentary system” (p. 116). Parliamentary activity involved a staggering amount of problem-solving and was surprisingly effective in a political landscape dissected by multiple and seemingly irreconcilable tendencies. Elections were critical, but they were also often inconclusive and caused instability, prompting political elites to adapt and settle their political outcomes ex post facto. Representation in such a context meant less a dyadic relationship between representatives and their constituencies, and more “a specific way of practicing topdown negotiations and bottom-up lawmaking” (p. 221). Parliamentarians were aware “of economic structures and their faults” (p. 135) and “implemented policies against their own interests” (p. 211) but they also refused to abolish laws and practices that impoverished the peasantry, forced them into the cities, and created large-scale landownership and concentrations of wealth so obscene that they effectively impeded governments’ ability to rule. And yet Rey insists on demonstrating the passion and sincerity that animated the liberal agenda, the consistency and fairness liberal politicians exercised in implementing it. Although ultimately short, the parliamentary period has had transformative and positive effects in both countries. Working in a raucous environment and persevering through many a setback, parliamentary leaders staunchly defended and expanded constitutional rights, fought to maintain a balance of powers between the different branches of government, and showed consistency in their promotion of social progress and political institution-building. They raised millions from poverty, all but eliminated illiteracy, and profoundly contributed towards the emergence of societies “within and of the state” (p. 12). Chapters 1 and 2 recount in striking detail how the privileged young men of Syria and Iraq harvested the fruits of institutionalism and liberalism sown decades prior by the tanzimat reformers. The chapters place Rey alongside historians such as Cyrus Schayegh who have theorized on the nature and the extent of post-Ottomanism in the empire’s different successor states. As is often the case, Syria and Iraq’s national systems were grafted onto preexisting structures of power. These included the monarchy in Iraq, and the urban notables in Syria. But Rey goes beyond official institutions, showing how electoral politics were worked into, and facilitated, systems of patronage and clientelism. “When institutionalized through parliamentary means,” Rey writes, “the za‘ama [notables] reinforced the role of political leaders from the great families”. Rey demonstrates how the political architecture of Syria was structured around state institutions which structured access to resources and facilitated the expansion of patronage and clientelism through their distribution. “Loyalties and clienteles were built by and through the parliamentary system” (p. 212), Rey explains. In order to find a place in such a system, a political candidate has to go through a process of “double standards”: he must not only win 48 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) elections, but also negotiate a successful admittance into a “circle of sociability created by the main figures of the system” (p. 212). Rey’s retelling of the trajectory of parliamentary governance in Iraq and Syria follows power struggles, factional rivalries, and the evolution of ties with external actors. His prose is presented chronologically but is analytically arranged: events are only recounted insofar as they illustrate a given dynamic. Praiseworthy in this regard is Rey's nuanced account of the broader historical context and the way he wields it to enrich the reader's comprehension of the domestic politics of Syria and Iraq. Focusing on the impact of military disaster in Palestine, the overthrow of Egypt’s monarchy, major demographic and economic transformations, and the rise of cold war politics in both countries, chapter 3 asks how parliamentarians responded to the demographic and political upheavals of the early 1950s. Rey has two answers: they devised new technologies of governance and incorporated new political terms into their vocabularies. In this great drama of modernization, “backwardness” became the biggest challenge, and “efficiency” was its one-size-fits-all solution. Arguing against historians who claimed political elites were unskilled and unequal to the many tasks at hand, Rey shows that Syrian and Iraqi parliamentarians innovated, coordinated, and promoted reforms. Experts were brought in, and ambitious development plans were drawn and funded. Albeit imperfectly, local, regional and national actors worked together to pave roads, expand and improve cities, regulate commerce, irrigate agricultural lands, industrialize the cities, and electrify the countryside. At the same time, both countries’ parliaments ceded ground to more personalized and centralized forms of power. Leadership changed its liberal hue to more technocratic colors, and executives began wielding their power in increasingly erratic and arbitrary ways. In the aftermath of 1948, Iraq’s Nouri al-Sa‘id cracked down on Iraq’s communist party and summarily moved to denaturalize and expel its ancient Jewish community. Syria’s Husni al-Za‘im seized power by force and cracked down on students and on the press, even temporarily suspending parliamentary activity and political parties. But parliamentarism endured. The right to vote was extended to Syrian women, and Syria’s parliamentary system recovered many of its powers. Al-Za‘im’s ill-fated 137 day long stint as president was ended prematurely by a coup d’état, as was his successor’s, Adib al-Shishakli. Iraq’s parties rejected Nouri al-Sa‘id’s plan to hollow out the legislature, and restored parliamentary restored parliamentary oversight over key parts of the state machinery. “In both cases,” Rey concludes, “the personalization of power stumbled when it came to the processes of institutionalization” (p. 105). Rey displays acumen in his fourth chapter, too, which focuses on the simultaneous processes of democratization and 49 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) fragmentation between 1954-1958. Rather than tell the political history of this period as a series of military overthrows and endemic instability that preludes the Ba Ba‘thist revolutionary movement, Rey argues that these years represent the “heyday of parliaments.” He follows parliamentarians’ and party leaders’ struggles to attain legitimacy and stability as partisan infighting spilled over to nearly every public arena. Part electoral history and part account of elite power-play, the chapter makes a convincing case for why we should consider voting and elections as only one part of parliamentary politics, and not necessarily its most important one, at that. The 1954 elections in both countries created fractured parliaments, which then needed to form ruling coalitions which would command public legitimacy. “Most of the election outcomes were the result of institutional arrangements ex post facto,” not clear-cut majorities established in the polls. This led to two intertwined dynamics. First, Rey shows that actors in parliament found a way to do without clear-cut majorities by manipulating the limits of legitimate political actions and positions, cultivating relationships with external partners, and by using procedural tactics in parliamentary discussion and heavily publicized reforms and projects to demonstrate their “efficiency” to the public. Second, parties soon collapsed as coherent political units, and individualism – within bounds – reigned in parliament. Parliamentarians were better described as either “insider” or “outsider.” The chapter also provides an important addition to the extensive literature on the 1956 Suez Crisis, by mapping its effects on Arab governments and political movements in the region. For Rey, the crisis hastened the adoption of cold war terminologies, accelerated the search for external allies, and helped make intelligence services a key political actor. The results were disastrous. The book ends with a short essay on what Rey calls the “exit process” of parliamentarism. He convincingly argues that his approach of writing a history whose goal is understanding “how the main components of political regimes change and impact on the general architecture and relations of power” (p. 206) stands at odds with previous scholars’ teleological narratives of the failure of parliamentarism in Iraq and Syria. The shift from pluralist and constitutionalist regimes to authoritarian and socialist ones in Iraq and Syria happened at the turn of the 1960s, when global politics were in turmoil. The USA and the USSR had streamlined authoritarianism within their own borders, and began believing that authoritarianism in the Third World was a simple and relatively cheap way to sponsor modernization projects and safeguard against encroachment from the other bloc. 1 1 The early 1960s has been described by historians – including by Rey himself – as the dawn of the imperial U.S. presidency. Also, the FBI has continued to surveil political activists with ties to communism, civil rights advocates, and American Muslims well into the 1960s, long after the famous “red scare” of the early 1950s. On 50 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023) Parliamentarism in Iraq and in Syria ended not because of broader developments in the region or in the world. Rather, it ended because of the particular way in which “politicians used the repercussions [of international developments] and articulated them with regards to local issues” (p. 209). Both the USSR and the USA supported Syrian and Iraqi political movements and leaders who no longer needed to forge broad consensuses or parliamentary coalitions and who operated in a political environment where political adversaries were routinely depicted as criminals and traitors. The Muslim Brotherhood, formerly in accordance with a broadly socialist agenda, had emerged as a new force on the right, offering a new outlet for the conservative urban bourgeoisie and shifting the political landscape towards a contest between leftwing secular progressives and right-wing religious conservatives. A series of coups and countercoups decimated what was left of the liberal architecture of power, and the general mood of frustration radicalized three key groups of the new elite – the army officers, the bureaucrats, and the intelligentsia. when basic social and economic rights were extended to as broad a group as possible. These new values, in an atmosphere of incessant clandestine political surveillance and repression by governments, made it possible for the new rulers to keep the trappings of democracy while hollowing out its core values. David Motzafi-Haller is a PhD candidate in International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. His work revolves around themes of social mobility and capital accumulation among developer families. Hand-in-hand with the rise in political violence, new ideas emerged about what democracy meant and who it was for. The supremacy of individual rights, the rule of law, separation of powers, and institutionalism gave way to the belief that true democracy could only be achieved the imperial presidency, see: Cyrus Schayegh (ed.), Globalizing the U.S. Presidency: Postcolonial Views of John F. Kennedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). On the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in US politics in the 1950s and 1960s, see, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI: A History (New-Haven, CT: Yale university Press, 2007): 149-174. 51 | Syrian Studies Association Bulletin Volume 27: Number 1 (Fall 2023)